June 18
“For the death that He died He died to sin, once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so, consider [or reckon] yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 6:10-11)
Continuing our lessons from The Green Letters:
APPROPRIATION
To appropriate something in our daily walk in Christ, we face two essentials: to see what is already ours in Christ, and to be aware of our need for it. On these two factors rests the ability to appropriate, to reach out in steadfast faith and receive what belongs to us in our Lord Jesus Christ. These two realities of seeing and needing bring us from childish meandering into a responsible, specific walk of faith. They take us from the “help me” attitude to that of giving thanks; from begging to appropriation. Note what L. L. Letgers, co-founder of Wycliff Bible Translators, has to say about this: “Blessed by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 1:3 A.S.V.). If you run over in your mind and find one blessing that with which God might bless us today, with which He has not already blessed us, then what He told Paul was not true at all, because He said, ‘God hath.’ It is all done. ‘It is finished.’ God hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies! The great pity of it all is that we are saying, ‘O God bless us! Bless us in this, bless us in that!’ and it is all done. He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies.” (p. 28)
As C. A. Coates said, “It is appropriation that tests us. How often we stop at admiration.” (p. 28)
IDENTIFICATION
Evan H. Hopkins: “The trouble of the believer who knows Christ as his justification is not sin as to its guilt, but sin as to its ruling power. In other words, it is not sin as to its load, or an offense, that he seeks to be freed…but it is from sin as a master. To know God’s way of deliverance from sin as a master he must apprehend the truth contained in the sixth chapter of Romans. There we see what God has done, not with our sins – that question the Apostle dealt with in the preceding chapters – but with ourselves, the agents and slaves of sin. He has put our old man – our original self – where He put our sins, namely on the cross with Christ. ‘Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Christ (Rom. 6:6). The believer there sees that Christ not only died for him – substitution – but that he died with Christ – identification.” (Thoughts on Life and Godliness, p. 50)
More tomorrow.